When I was in professional politics, it was not the liberals who truly, personally hated me.

Those who really HATED me were the Nasty Little People, the NLP.

This came up a lot when we were going out and setting up press reviews for real populist uprisings, like anti-busing marches and protests against dirty school textbooks, the Independent Truckers’ Strike and on and on.

The grassrooters loved us.

But when a protest got to a certain level of publicity, their leaders realized that this was the first and last time they would be in the limelight. They must have decided we were going to take their movement from them.

No way we could or would do that, but they, these small-time, temporary leaders, were the ones who hated us with a sincerity Goebbels would have admired.

William Buckley and his protégés really hated me, though that is the LAAAHST thing Buckley would ever have admitted, even to himself.

His partner and life-long friend, who sat in an identical office on the top floor, was William Rusher, and I was HIS protégé. It made for a really unique civil war at National Review.

Rusher’s crowd produced a review of my first book, which had a Foreword by Rusher, that was titled, “Read This One!”

Then Buckley’s crowd produced a front-page article attacking me called “To the Nashville Station,” comparing me to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station in 1917.

Then after the coalition of conservatives and “Wallace Democrats” I had advocated all that time won the 1980 landslide, it turned out the Buckley side had been for it all the time.

The Buckley crowd is now neoconservative, using the REAL definition of that word.

They are what they have always been, the opposition that those in power want.

They have found a way to make a living on the permanently losing side. They go to pieces when some Big Time Leftist says something nice about them.

I am getting some totally second-hand reports about how many AMPWs are going from looking down on us mere peasants to getting red-faced about the Mantra.

Like I said, I am getting this second-hand.

But it sure sounds very familiar.